Flock Safety camera toppled in downtown Reno

Our Take

Credit to This Is Reno for being on the scene fast: a Flock Safety camera down on the ground, no clear cause, and a police department that doesn't have much to say yet. That vacuum of information is exactly the problem with how these cameras get installed in the first place — quietly, often without real public debate, until a city council realizes there's a network of license plate readers logging every car that passes through downtown.

We're not in the business of cheering on vandalism, and we don't know what actually happened to this pole. But we do know that a toppled camera getting local news coverage says something about public sentiment that Flock's sales pitch to city councils conveniently leaves out. People notice these things. People ask questions. And increasingly, people are frustrated that a private company is quietly building a surveillance dragnet on public streets with little oversight and even less transparency about who can access the data and why.

If you want to know whether there's a Flock camera already watching your commute, check our camera map. And if Reno's city council hasn't had a real public hearing on this system, that's worth bringing up — see our take-action page for how to push back before these networks expand further.